Post 1: Intro to Intro

This blog that I will be keeping throughout the semester will be in an effort to break down the concepts and strategies covered over the course of BU-215, aka Intro to Marketing. There is some history of marketing experiences in my life but taking a full semester course should prove to be an enlightening experience on the subject. My formal introduction to marketing, at least in a scholastic sense, came during a short module of the BU-113 course that lacked depth and detailed coverage of the material, but was successful in teaching the most basic concepts of marketing and how it should be applied to the product we were selling in the marketplace portion of that course. All of the rest of my history and acquaintance with marketing is specific to personal marketing and comes from an earlier time in my life when hockey played a much bigger role. In an effort to keep moving forward along the path I desired I was constantly trying to get noticed and “sell” my skills to coaches and programs I wanted to be a part of, during high school, I had to apply and market myself to prep schools, in prep school I had to market myself to junior teams, and in juniors I had to market apply and myself to colleges. I knew nothing of marketing terminology at the time, or even that I was applying marketing concepts in any way, but looking back now with an understanding of some basics, it is clear to see the similarities between marketing myself and what is needed to market a product or service for profit.

Marketing is defined in our textbook as the activity for creating, delivering and exchanging offerings that benefit its customers, the organization, its stakeholders, and society at large. Admittedly, there are vast differences between me trying to get noticed for a hockey team and a fully planned, multiple medium, large scale marketing effort but both can be broken down using tools such as the 4 P’s and SWOT analysis. Using the 4 P’s, Product, Place, Price, and Promotion, you could say the product was my abilities, the place was wherever I was playing, the price would be my performance once on their team, and my promotion was my performance on my current team. When marketing a product, it is also important to pay attention to all of these aspects and what approach will work best given your product and target market. SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; an analysis of these will give you an idea of where you are and what you need to do in the future to become more relevant or stay relevant in your market.

The topics of this blog will continue to roughly parallel the lessons and topics of the class, ideally using different forms and media to convey new ideas.